Middle East|Issue of Pay for 2 Sets of Workers Tugs at Palestinian Pact

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Issue of Pay for 2 Sets of Workers Tugs at Palestinian Pact

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Rashad Samouni, 2, looked through a plastic sheet that acts as a window at his home in Gaza City. A rift over government pay has shaken the fragile pact between Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

GAZA CITY — Abu Raid al-Samouni, 46, a driver and office cleaner in the Foreign Ministry headquarters here, leaves for work before his 14 children wake up each morning, to avoid their pleas for spare change to buy candy. Like the other 42,000 workers hired while the militant Islamic group Hamas ran the Gaza government over the past seven years, Mr. Samouni has received only part of his $350 monthly salary since October; in April and May, there was no paycheck at all.

Mustafa, 34, a security officer who spoke on the condition that his last name not be used for fear of reprisals, spent a recent afternoon smoking a water pipe in a beachside cafe as his three children swam in the Mediterranean Sea. Like the other 70,000 people employed by the Palestinian Authority in Gaza before Hamas wrested control of it, the political split means that he has continued to collect his full salary — $520 a month — without ever actually going to work.

The tale of these two men illustrates a central dilemma facing the new Palestinian government rooted in the recent reconciliation deal intended to end the bitter schism between Hamas and the secular, more moderate Fatah faction that dominates the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas leaders have said they have no information about the abduction but nonetheless praised it, and lashed out at President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority for condemning the captors and deploying his security forces to help Israel track them down.

Yet underlying that fierce ideological battle is a more basic, bureaucratic one that also endangers the fragile agreement.

The Palestinian prime minister insists that he does not have enough money to pay both sets of workers and, perhaps more important, cannot risk the wrath of other countries by even funneling donated funds to anyone affiliated with Hamas.

“We hoped the situation would be different with the new government, but what I see is that the situation is moving backward,” said Mr. Samouni, the Hamas worker. His Gaza City home lacks interior doors and has plastic sheeting covering windows because he could not afford to finish rebuilding after it was demolished during the Israeli incursion in 2009. “No one is looking out for us.”

Mustafa, who has used his spare time to earn $25 a day driving a taxi in recent years, said of Mr. Samouni and his colleagues, “I feel sorry for them, but it’s not my problem.”

“I know these young employees have no fault, and it’s hard to imagine how they will return to their kids without money or food in Ramadan,” Mustafa said, referring to the Muslim holy month, which starts Saturday. “But it’s the dirty politics.”

On Thursday, some Hamas-appointed workers went on strike to protest the lack of pay, though the effects were minimal because security and health care services continued as usual.

“This is an initial warning measure, and other escalatory measures will follow until we get all our rights from those who do not consider us in their calculations,” said Mohammed Siam, a spokesman for the workers. “We want our rights as legitimate employees to be recognized.”

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Being a government employee in Gaza does not guarantee a paycheck, as workers hired by rival political factions fight for scarce funds.CreditCreditWissam Nassar for The New York Times

With payday coming next week, many Palestinians fear a reprise of what happened earlier this month: Hamas officers, in order to block the former Palestinian Authority workers from withdrawing their salaries, shut down banks across Gaza for a week, further weakening the economy.

Hamas, which won legislative elections in 2006, had essentially run a shadow government in Gaza since 2007. After the failure of a unity government, there was a brief but bloody battle in Gaza in which Hamas routed Fatah and its Palestinian Authority from the area.

Its finances were always mysterious, but they largely dried up after a break with Iran over the Syrian civil war and, especially, Egypt’s shutting of thousands of smuggling tunnels since the ascendancy of its military-backed government last summer.

The inability to pay government salaries, along with soaring unemployment and fuel shortages worsened by the tunnel closings, were prime reasons Hamas agreed to reconciliation terms it had repeatedly rejected before.

Yet the agreement Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed in April left to a committee the problem of reconciling the two sets of workers, which several Palestinian officials acknowledge far exceed the number the government can afford to cover Gaza’s 1.7 million residents.

“We have to look into these 42,000 employees, their names, their files,” Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah said in a recent interview. “If somebody is employed without a qualification, how could we accept that? Suppose you have two persons for one post? You should work on that and sort it out. This should take time.”

With a $1.3 billion deficit in the Palestinian Authority’s $4.6 billion budget for 2014, Mr. Hamdallah said, “I made clear and the president made clear that we cannot afford to pay.”

Ehab Bessaiso, a government spokesman, said Qatar had agreed to donate $60 million over three months — perhaps 40 percent of what is needed — for the Hamas workers. But getting it into their hands is another matter.

Washington and other Western capitals said they would continue working with the new government while watching closely to ensure that it did not directly involve Hamas, which they consider a terrorist organization. Banks, too, are wary of facing sanctions if they handle the funds. Robert H. Serry, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, has been trying to negotiate a transfer, but Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, threatened this week to expel him from Jerusalem for doing so.

“There are financial, administrative and political complications,” Mr. Bessaiso said. “The Qataris always say, ‘No problem.’ But the problem is in the mechanisms.”

Mustafa is unworried by it all. He spends days at the beach with his family — “this is our only escape,” he said — and, lately, evenings smoking shisha at another cafe, watching World Cup matches. For Ramadan, he plans to stay up all night, indulge in the pre-dawn meal, then sleep through the hot hours.

Mr. Samouni will be at work, worrying about how to buy groceries for the celebratory iftar dinners. On Wednesday, his wife, Imam, 44, showed a refrigerator bare but for a few tomatoes, a jar of tomato sauce, a dish of dried thyme and a loaf of bread.

Before getting the government job in 2012, Mr. Samouni made less than $10 a day hawking roasted nuts from a street cart. At $350 a month, he is on the low end of the Hamas pay scale — the upside being that during the lean months after the military takeover in Egypt, he did not lose much because the minimum each worker received was about $290 ($60 goes to transportation for his nine-mile commute).

Except the last two months, when they all got zero. “We don’t know if we are here or there,” he said, referring to the fact that Hamas has officially stepped away from leading the Gaza ministries, but the new government has not stepped in. “What we know is that we are lost.”

Correction:June 26, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the salary of Mustafa, a security officer. He earns $520 a month, not $5,200.

Fares Akram reported from Gaza City, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Issue of Pay for 2 Sets of Workers Tugs at Palestinian Pact. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe